


Somewhere That's Green

by Apricot



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Artistic License: Aerospace Engineering, Gen, One Shot, Season/Series 03 Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-17
Updated: 2017-07-17
Packaged: 2018-11-28 15:41:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,564
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11421069
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Apricot/pseuds/Apricot
Summary: The Plant Monster may be dead, but she left her babies with a nightlight. Plus: Minkowski's inner Eiffel voice, musical theater references, the uncomfortable truth about space station dust, and the sticky seeds of revenge.





	Somewhere That's Green

**Author's Note:**

> Set somewhere in late S3, between Episodes 39-42.

“You know, Hera…” Minkowski panted, squeezing the crowbar tight in her sweaty hands as she worked to pry open the T2-B duct. “If I had known that—“ the crowbar slipped from her grasp and she fumbled for it with a snarl, before snatching it out of the air again and wedging it into the duct crevice _hard._

Finding the right application of force in a zero-gravity environment? Yeah. It sucked.

“If I had known…I was going to spend… _ninety percent of my time…_ as a glorified mechanic on the universe’s _worst_ rust bucket, I think I would have rethought the whole astronaut application _thing."_  
  
"No you wouldn't have." Hera's speaker crackled a little, and Minkowski scowled at it.  
  
"Yes I would've," she insisted, and batted at the sweat that clung to her skin, rather than fell. She gritted her teeth and  _yanked_ , hard, and the duct panel finally groaned, nearly peeling open.  
  
"Holy crap." The thing was rusted and...was that moisture? How did moisture get into this duct? The Urania had fixed the Hephaestus' structural problems and patched up the cracks of the water reclaimer...but apparently, there'd been a few air ducts that hadn't been sealed as tight as they'd hoped. She touched the inside of the duct and swore to herself when her fingers came away with a reddish smear of rust particles and dust. It was times like this that she didn't like to remind herself that they were in space, and therefore...no dirt. The only thing that could make dust was the metal of the ship grinding against itself and...well, its inhabitants.   
  
"Hera, I think there's a busted water line in here."   
  
The speaker crackled. "I'm not seeing any drop in reclamation production. Are you sure...?"  
  
"Well, there's something causing it," she snapped. The duct was big enough that she could just wedge herself inside it, if she shimmied a little. She hoisted herself up into it-- zero gravity  _did_  help with that-- and began to slowly follow the dark air duct, searching the lines for a break.  
  
Her fingers skimmed along the cool metal, but she didn't find one.   
  
"Hera?"  
  
"Yes, Lieutenant--"  
  
"Can you tell me exactly where I'm at right now?"  
  
"You're about 15 feet south of the engineering section." The AI's voice vibrated against the walls of the air duct a little. Minkowski thought that the speaker had to be directly below it.  She thought that she heard muffled voices coming from that direction. She pursed her lips. "Kepler and Jacobi still in there?"  
  
Hera was quiet.  
  
"Hera?"  
  
"Yes," Hera sounded testy. "And Captain Lovelace and Eiffel are in the comms room, trying to rewire the receptor dish. Maxwell's in the mess hall, and Hilbert's in his lab, and I'm everywhere in the ship."  
  
"Don't get grumpy at me," Minkowski snapped. "I just..."  
  
Hera exhaled through the speaker. "I know."  
  
They were all on edge. Even Hera. With the contact event coming up, and with Minkowski trying to keep one eye on the SI-5 agents and the other on making sure the ship didn't blow up or fall into a star of have some other kind of calamity...  
  
"Sorry," she muttered. She crawled another few feet, farther away from the voices in engineering in the pitch-black of the air ducts. If she was right on target, there should be a sharp turn right here...  
  
Her fingers traced the wall and found it. Minkowski grinned. "Like riding a bike."  
  
"Lieutenant?"  
  
"Nothing."  
  
The water reclaimer main had to be around here somewhere.  
  
She edged along the wall. The droplets of water were floating in front of her nose now-- she felt them splash against her skin and then dodged a large cluster of them as she turned another corner.  
  
Wait. Dodged?  
  
Minkowski blinked. How had she seen those water droplets if she was in the pitch black? There shouldn't be any light up here, and her eyesight wasn't that good...She hesitated just a second, before she inched down the duct. And then she put her hand into something sticky, and wet, and  _moving_.  
  
"Gaaahhh!"  
  
She jolted back. It smelled like...it smelled like wet grass and rot. Her brain flipped from the burst of adrenaline to realization.  
  
It was the plant monster.

Or...or what was left of the plant monster.

It couldn't be.... _alive_.  
  
The light was coming from around the corner, and Minkowski swallowed hard before she slowly scooted her way toward it, away from the sticky pile of plant matter she'd accidentally touched.  
  
And sucked in a breath.  
  
The air duct opened up here, into a long corridor that fed into multiple ducts that she knew went to different parts of the Hephaestus. That one she'd came from went to engineering, that one to the crew quarters...that one to the airlock...the labs. The hall duct she was in now was wide, and in it...In it was a small, glowing lamp light. Built into the wall and wired directly into one of the electrical wires. It glowed defiantly at her, like a tiny eye. And it illuminated....  
  
There were other piles of plant matter, stuck to the walls, to the floor. They looked like small, fuzzy green kidneys and were pulsing softly.  
  
"Oh, God..." Minkowski muttered.  
  
And there was the broken reclamation line. But it had been patched with plant matter, so the water took a little detour through the weird, creepy...impromptu greenhouse.   
  
"Nothing on this ship that you guys aren't unaware of, right, Colonel?" she muttered. The thought of Kepler's face when she told him about this was actually kind of amusing.   
  
She approached one of the piles--  _seeds_ _?_ \-- and it...trembled. It shied away from her presence. It knew she was there.  
  
"Oh," Minkowski said. "I guess you...well, I'm sorry about your...that wasn't me, I mean..."  
  
_There's not exactly a sympathy card for "Sorry Major Mulcher vented your Mean Green Mother from Outer Space into Weedwacker 359."_  
  
She banished the sarcastic thought, which had suspiciously sounded like Eiffel. The seed-spore was slowly trying to drag itself away from her, propelling itself along the metal wall of the duct with the small, finger-like protrusions that covered it. It left a glistening trail that Minkowski decided she really didn't want to think about. She drifted back to give it a bit more space.

"I could just forget that I saw you," she said, to the seeds. "I know that we didn't exactly...follow through on the last deal that I made and...and I'm sorry about that."

Of course, the situation was complicated now by Major Kepler and the rest of the SI-5. She had no doubt that Kepler would probably send Jacobi after this place with a flame-thrower. 

Which was, technically, what should happen. Pryce and Carter...well, "live and let live" wasn't listed anywhere in it. Especially when the thing "living" was a sentient plant monster created by an evil scientist in his  _off-hours_ when he wasn't experimenting on the rest of the crew.

But on the other hand...they weren't exactly hurting anyone. And even though she hadn't been party to it, she felt...okay, she felt guilty about the whole Plant Monster thing. They'd had a deal, damn it. She hated breaking her word. 

Minkowski couldn't just do  _nothing,_ though. She wasn't in command of the Hephaestus anymore and that meant that she needed to report this. To Kepler. Who would probably blow another hole in her ship and endanger everyone's lives just a little more.

 _Everyone tells tiny lies._ The little light the plant monster had built swayed softly as one of the seed-spores crept a little closer to it. _And d_ _oesn't the end justify the beans, Commander?_  

She pursed her lips tightly and then narrowed her eyes before she looked over at the...baby Plant Monsters. 

"Look. I kind of had a...well, kind of like a deal before, and as far as I'm concerned, that still stands."

The seed-spores quivered at her voice, loud in the small space. They didn't creep away from her, and several of those weird little protrusions turned toward her which she took to indicate that they were listening. Minkowski furrowed her brow.   
  
"In fact," she said, thinking about Kepler and his smug, stupid face, before she seized her decision with the recklessness of someone deciding they might as well just cannonball off the cliff they were already slipping down. "I'll  _sweeten_  the deal."

* * *

"Lieutenant?"  
  
Minkowski brushed her suit, sighing at the streaks of reddish rust and...green slime... _Great, just great_.  
  
"Yeah, Hera?"  
  
"Where'd you just go?"  
  
"Oh." Minkowski tried to make that sound casual. "Just to the Urania for a second. I wanted to check...how their wiring looked to compare it against the Hephaestus."  
  
"Uh--"  
  
"Don't worry about it."  
  
"I wasn't," Hera said slowly. "But their system's more advanced than the one on the Hephaestus..."

"And I just had to...drop something off. I'm gonna change my suit and I think we'll just wait to see if the reclaimer drops production before we go trying to take the stupid thing apart. What do you think?"

"Okaaaaay, Lieutenant..."

Minkowski tucked a wayward strand of hair away from her face and pocketed the flathead screwdriver she'd used to pry open one of the Urania's air duct panels. And resisted the urge to smile.


End file.
